you have to be a little bit crazy to survive

Them zombies be waaay too fast (Reply)

I started out as a male character of some sort running through dark streets with a female character. There were zombies around, and as they started chasing us, I noted they ran as fast and as well as we did. The girl was caught, but I kept running because there was nothing I could do (also I think my character might not have been the greatest person during this part of the dream).

I lost the zombies, mostly because they were distracted by lunch. There was a logic-fails bit where I met up with another guy who I knew and apparently hid out with him a lot. At this point the dream decided my character was female, and probably about 12. There was a hideout of some sort behind a wall, accessed by a small opening through the back of a partly-destroyed bookshelf that was sitting on the outside of the building. I handed some scavenged things through the opening to the guy who was already inside the hideout.

The opening became less and less useful as the dream had trouble holding onto the concept (that was already ridiculous to begin with, it's hard to explain how this opening looked) and I realized I was going to need to hide somewhere else. There was a dresser nearby, basically on the sidewalk, and I think my brain was trying to force it into a more useful shape of some sort, like a wooden box of roughly the same size so I could at least hide and maybe even get some sleep.

I'm not sure how the transition happened but the next thing I knew, I was entering a shopping mall where a survival gang of people with military expertise were doing something. I'm not entirely sure what they were doing because they were getting ready to leave. I found some office supplies and said I was going to scavenge useful stuff, and dumped a bunch of them in a reusable grocery bag that I basically produced from thin air. I noticed a more organized container of some sort with a lot of office supplies in it that I remembered I had put together at some point before, but the team said they were leaving and I decided to leave it there and take my bag of randomness with me.

I was trying to convince the team to take me with them as they left the building, and it was now daylight. We had to push our way out through an angry crowd of people who were trying to get in, and the place we were leaving had suddenly become a police station. There were police officers around keeping the people from getting into the door we'd just left. We were able to continue on through the parking lot, and I was now a woman in about my 20's.

We were all running at this point, and most of the team was faster. They were heading for vehicles on the far side of the parking lot. Running near me was a black lady with her two kids, one in each hand. One child was a girl who was maybe 4 or 5 years old, and the other was a boy who couldn't have been more than 3. The kids couldn't run very fest, so I offered to help and took the little girl in hand. I ended up picking her up because I could run faster that way than leading her by the hand.

A car was driving through the parking lot nearby, and I got the sense as it came closer to me that the lady in the car was the sort of person who would buy children for nefarious purposes. Unlike the character I had started the dream with, I wasn't going to even think about that, but that meant I was in potential danger if the person in the car decided to come after me. As it was, I made it to the vehicles the team was getting into, and they did let me come with them.

As we were driving away, I mentioned the shady lady in the car. Someone made a joke about if we thought she wasn't the sweetheart she was in some other show (as if two different fictional characters had the same actress, which made sense in fail-dream-logic that was a massive hint we were all not in "real life" but some TV show plot).

We were driving through a somewhat wooded area when I saw we were being followed by a man on horseback. He was wearing a uniform that was somewhat police-man-Canadian-mountie themed, and he was leaning over the saddle so badly I wondered if he was injured. The car we were in wasn't going very fast at this point, and he was able to keep up and follow the car right behind us. He sped up enough to follow the car on the passenger side, and the person riding shotgun opened their window and started talking to him.

Turns out he wasn't injured, he was just really worried about some kind of qualifying test he had to do that day, something that would advance his rank in post-apocalyptic law enforcement or whatever it was he was doing. The guy talking to him said something like, "You'll do fine," and as a good luck charm, handed him his own patch that was the reward for that test (he hadn't sewn it on anything apparently).

The guy went off some other direction and as our car pulled away from him, I remember thinking that guy was probably doomed and the dude who'd loaned him his patch was gonna get it back under unhappy circumstances.